On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:35:21 EDT, Sean Donelan said: > This doesn't explain why many universities, most with active, symmetric > ethernet switches in residential dorms, have been deploying packet shaping > technology for even longer than the cable companies. If the answer was > as simple as upgrading everyone to 100Mbps symmetric ethernet, or even > 1Gbps symmetric ethernet, then the university resnet's would be in great > shape.
If I didn't know better, I'd say Sean was trolling me, but I'll bite anyhow. ;) Actually, upgrading everybody to 100BaseT makes the problem worse, because then if everybody cranks it up at once, the problem moves from "need upstream links that are $PRICY" into the "need upstream links that are $NOEXIST". We have some 9,000+ students resident on campus. Essentially every single one has a 100BaseT jack, and we're working on getting to Gig-E across the board over the next few years. That leaves us two choices on the upstream side - statistical mux effects (and emulating said effects via traffic shaping), or find a way to trunk 225 40GigE links together. And that's just 9,000 customers - if we were a provider the size of most cable companies, we'd *really* be in trouble. Fortunately, statistical mux effects and a little bit of port-agnostic traffic shaping (you go over a well-publicized upload byte limit for a 24 hour span, you get magically turned into a 56k dialup), we fit quite nicely into a single gig-E link and a 622mbit link. Now if any of you guys have a lead on an affordable way to get 225 40GigE's from here to someplace that can *take* 225 40Gig-E's... ;)
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